The title of "Real Women Have Curves" suggests a lesson in body acceptance, but the movie is much more than that. It also charts the emotional curves -- mostly of the hairpin variety -- experienced by a neurotic Latina mom (Lupe Ontiveros) who's desperate to keep her teenage daughter from leaving home.

Ontiveros ("Chuck & Buck") creates an East Los Angeles matriarch beset by selfishness and overweening love for her family. Then the actress, possessed of the best poker face in the business, adds a subtler layer that says this woman knows that her manipulations are transparent but doesn't know how else to act.

Her tour de force performance is just one revelation in "Real Women Have Curves," a warm, funny family story that defies popular notions about immigrant families. The mother doesn't want her daughter, Ana, to have a better life than she has; she resents the girl's opportunities. "I've had to work since I was 13," she tells her long-suffering husband. "Now it's her turn. "

Directed by Patricia Cardoso and co-written by Josefina Lopez from Lopez's play, "Real Women" has the feel of having real women behind it. Ana, played by amazingly natural newcomer America Ferrera, is just as complex as the mother. Ferrera beams and scowls with equal ferocity, struts her shapely stuff and generally acts as if she knows it all. In other words, she's a teenager.

The girl dismisses her older sister's dressmaking business as a "sweatshop, " though she has no clue about the real world. Her blithe sense of certainty comes in handy, however, in combating her mother's constant cracks about her weight. Ferrera's affectionate eye rolling suggests that the girl long ago learned to indulge her mother's antics.

Ana, an exceptional student, is about to graduate and wants to go to college. But her mother puts her to work in the dressmaking shop to help support the family. Mom uses every trick in the book to keep Ana at home, even convincing herself she's pregnant again when she's really menopausal. "You sure it's not just gas?" Ana asks.

embodied by Ana's bus rides from the colorful graffiti'd walls and fruit stands of East Los Angeles to high school in manicured, sedate Beverly Hills. The movie also conveys the importance of extended family among Latinos. Ana might have a hellion of a mom, but she's also got a sweet grandpa and an older sister in the house to act as buffers.

Ingrid Oliu excels as the older sister trying to keep her business afloat, mixing a hard-won dignity with a constant undercurrent of stress. But even the boss loosens up for a moment of exuberant, unencumbered fun among the garment workers -- the film's emotional highlight. .